Wednesday, December 21, 2016

FX of Demonic Possession interviewed by Drumtrip's Law"MP3 weren’t available in 1993, so for me to put the tracks into digital form would detract massively from their authenticity! .... it is no word of a lie then I say that I don’t even make digital masters of the releases for my own uses. I will get dubs cut to test out new tracks... Demonic stuff is designed from the ground up to be enjoyed on wax, so if you don’t own the physical record you are kind of missing the point!"

"The dark sound is by far my favourite flavour in the rave scene and there was a period during late ’92 though to the ‘Dark Summer’ of ’93 where pretty much anything went musically, and people were really experimenting with what samplers and breakbeats could do.... I think there is still a lot of mileage left in experimenting with those sounds as the scene was progressing so quickly back then. Back then, the emphasis was always on finding something ‘new’ to push the musical barriers, and not necessarily exploiting all that a particular ‘current’ sound had to offer, so I do feel that this particular era ended prematurely."

"I also listen to a lot of late 70’s punk stuff, as I really love the unstructured and chaotic DIY ethos of that whole scene. Once you scratch beneath the surface of the Sex Pistols / Clash / Buzzcocks etc, there is a whole world of music that is very similar in nature to the early jungle movement. In fact, i truly believe that if they had had access to samplers in 1976, then hardcore would have happened a lot earlier! The vibe is the same, its just the instruments that are different."

Demonic Possession have their own interviews with darkcore heroes of theirs on the website

‘Lingering Post-Cold War Paranoia Techno’ ‘Running On Air’ the album, was written in the 1990s by Joe Evans in his cable-strewn midi-bunker (at various times located in Glasgow, Northampton and London) using glowing hardware audio devices and a Mac Classic to rouse and rally them. It was born during a period when the internet had become accessible and useful to many; information was being shared, picked-over and proliferated by the masses like never before. It was also a time when the music industry first got a glimpse of its demise amidst blazing creativity and genre-fracturing musical discourse on forums, online radio stations, pirate radio stations and clubs — and the killer, file sharing. This album is a unique document of the times and exists as an amalgamation of themes and situations, rather than of genre or musical language. Civil unrest, insidious state surveillance, the searing blaze of toddling microchip technology, lingering post-Cold War paranoia, the abandonment of the natural world, machines with ambition, humans honing their steel-cold egotism, beautiful relationships in a world championing the moody lone ranger — all these themes lie down together, forming the timeless strata of ‘Running On Air’.

Was this really written / recorded in the 1990s, or is it made to sound like it was? That's what I wondered when reading the blurb above... It doesn't sound like something actually from that time, as much as it stays within the technical limitations and tropes of that decade. But perhaps this is just me being paranoid... Nowadays you can't trust anything you read.

Patterned Air also have another release out around this time too - Woodland Walk by CukoO
- this didn't grasp me quite as tightly as the RunningOnAir and Assembled Minds, although it's excellent stuff.

“The
album I wrote a few years ago which was commissioned by Portage in Newham,
London, is soon to be released on Patterned Air. It is a collection of tunes
based on a trip to the woods and was originally written with Severely and
Profoundly Disabled Children in mind. I wanted to write music that both the
child and adult would enjoy as most music for children is written by idiots
with no taste in music. I have a background in electronic/space
rock/Gamelan/Egyptian/techno so therefore the music I write is ok.” — Victoria Wilson

As
CukoO, Victoria Wilson creates music as a means of sensory stimulation for
children with special needs. In the classroom, each track is played to the
children and is accompanied by a physical item relating to the aural ‘story'
(in the case of this first album, a woodland walk). This item (feather, pine
cone, brush etc.) is used to stimulate the child by feel, sound, weight and
texture so allowing them to experience a whole other dimension to the story and
the sounds, becoming more deeply immersed in it and in their activated senses.

These
works are beautiful examples of analogue electronic sounds balanced with
traditional classroom instrumentation. So, sitting happily alongside an EMS
VCS3 analogue synth, a Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape machine and various
oscillators, we find sopranino and treble recorders, glockenspiel, clarinet,
saxophone, bongos, acoustic guitar and all manner of other typically 1970’s
music-classroom paraphernalia. And to this 70’s child, the music is redolent of
those sunny, dusty music rooms, and nature walks through dank woods, the smell
of crumbling corridors and daring adventures in the garden tangle and unknown
streets.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

one of the few things to intrigue me to check it out on that TMTlist of the year's best"Captagon was the Belgian gabber scene’s drug of choice. No wonder: amphetamines were a minimum requirement to keep up with that sort of rhythm. Then again, the pill was also used to treat children with attention disorders; it was bound to have unexpected side effects sooner or later. A couple of decades past the gabber heyday, DJ Coquelin and MC Cloarec popped a couple of tabs, laid a scattershot but unmistakably demented beat, and started flipping the dial. JE M’EN TAPE was the aural register of such a journey, much more than the sound of an evening spent shaking your head out of its socket. The rush of clarity that the psychostimulant provided them blasted the duo through makina snippets, chopped-n-screwed Zeuhl, German hip-hop sketches, EBM relics, Italian tecnopop, and acid mixes of American pop hits, mapping the outskirts of the European electronic scene that trendy mags usually overlook. The stuff you’d find in gas station discount bins near the once-porous borders that birthed legends like the Gypsy Kings, DJ Bobo, Baccara, Gigi D’Agostino, Laid Back, or Mano Negra. An autoethnography of the willfully trashy, uncool, and… fun in the shape of a cassette.–JRODRIGUEZ6"Captagon? Specifically favored by the Belgians? Not heard that one before but it's delivered authoritatively. I looked it up and all the articles about captagon seem to be about how it's ISIS troops drug of choice. Shades of this book which is on my must-to-read list... Back to the TMT list - they have Future's EVOL in there - absent in every other end-of-year list - so their planet of sound converges with mine in at least one place. (Although I prefer Purple Reign). (But EVOL does have "Low Life" - jam of the year, unmentioned anywhere - on it).Oooh, they also have Jeremih’s Late Nights in their list - another point of convergenceand this particular astonishing track got mentioned in the tracks of year list, i believeOverall though all the conceptronica and agit-noise and postvaporwave (Yves Tumor, Elysia Crampton, Anonhi, Arca, Babyfather....) seems most unenticing to me (reasons to be explored more in end-of-yr-list on the main blog ).

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

shit be played out, to put it mildly, conceptuallyentertainingly executed though

also from the FACT Top 50 albums list is this, coming more from a Caretaker/Death of Rave angleSingulacra by Sophia Loizoubandcamp commenters say variously:Like hearing a 90s rave through a long dark tunnel. The music evokes massive nostalgia and a mixture of joy and sadness. Exquisitely done, the snatches of recognisable tunes only adds to the feeling of otherness and times gone by.Favorite track: The Voices of Time.andBrilliant follow-up to the classical electronics of Chrysalis, perfectly tapping into the recent welcome nostalgia for early-'90s rave and jungle, in a distinctly sui generis fashion.Favorite track: Genesis 92: The Awakening.Singulacra by Sophia Loizou

Do me a fucking favour - this is almost literally a replay of Caretaker's The Death of Rave.The Death of Rave, with added guff. Viz, the press release:

Bristol, England-based sound artist and producer Sophia Loizou... builds on the framework of [2014's] Chrysalis for her most ambitious offering to date. Ghostly remnants of hardcore and early jungle percolate throughout while fragments of radio transmissions seep in and out through tape-based processes and spectral processing, leaving the listener in a hauntingly beautiful landscape filled with both solidity and disintegration. Bringing back the times of pirate radio, almost like lost transmissions from beyond the grave, this work provides a sense of intimacy and familiarity during the contemporary full-speed acceleration toward unknown futures. Exploring its audiences' anxieties surrounding technological utopias while retaining an emphasis on nurturing human value when facing inhuman forces, Singulacra engages with the potential loss of human essence amid technological progress toward artificial intelligence.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Paul Ibiza being the founder of Ibiza Records, the first label associated with the concept of "Jungle Techno" - a term that dates back to '91 as a Noise Factory track title

Ibiza itself dates back to 1989

The reggae connection was ancestral for Paul:

"... I began asking questions as my
dad had a sound called Billy The Clown alongside Fatman Sound in 62. " Also "I’m connected to the early sound system pioneers such as Fatman International, Fonso, Sir Bigs, Rocky Sound System back then, as my granddad had a garage round the back of our house (in the60s) and would rent the garage out to all soundmen.... All the soundmen would come there on the weekend and share each other’s boxes... I used to watch all this as a kid in the 70s. They would fix amps, paint boxes, etc…"

Around time of forming Ibiza: "I found
JTS and Music House (mastering and dubplate studios). JTS is run by Keith who
owns Jah Tubby’s World Sound System, a sound that started in 1971. Then you had
Chris at Music House who had a band called Black Slate, he was doing dubs for
all the reggae men. When I found Music House, it was easy, I told Chris, ‘this
is the new thing coming, it’s called hardcore’, (the term jungle was not used
at that time). When he first heard it, he said ‘this is mad music man’. I said
‘Chris, this is the future’. He found it a bit mad because he was used to
cutting reggae and this new hardcore stuff was a bit noisy for him but over time
he got use to how I wanted the cut it loud as I was breaking musical rules."

Yet ironically the initial musical trigger came in large part from Europe (and Brooklyn via Belgium) - even the idea of sampling dancehall came from Beltram!

"

A label called R & S Records in Germany had a tune by
Joey Beltram called ‘My Sound’, that was the first time I heard a ragga sample
in hardcore."

(Although Ragga Twins also germinal).

Interesting tidbit on how the dancehall vocal samples became so prominent:

"The sound tapes used to be recorded in split stereo, one side would be the music and one side the vocal. We’d isolate the vocals and bring them into our tracks. That’s why all these jungle tracks are full of vocals from sound clashes."

The core figure:

"James (Noise Factory) was with Ibiza Records up to our 12th
release and at that point he went off to form 3rd Party with Terry T and a guy
called Kevin Mullqueen. James then later joined Kemet Records... If it wasn’t for him, there would be no
jungle now!

Origin of the word "jungle", according to Paul Ibiza, is not "junglist" by way of Arnette Gardens (the jungle) in Kingston, but James Brown

"

Whilst we
were working on our 8th release there was an LP on the floor, a James Brown
release called ‘In theJungle Groove’, 1975. So I said, ‘it must be a sign’. We
agreed the track we were working on ,‘sounds jungly’, and this was when ‘jungle
techno’ was born."

Later on Paul starts the Jungle Splash rave at The Rocket, Holloway Road in '94 and works with reggae label Jet Star to do the Jungle Hits comps.

The present: "We have this new thing called Jungle Dub... We’ve gone back to the sound system. I bought
a sound system and taking it back full circle to the sound system days."